Purpose

To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

The Rise of Private 'Luxury' Mass Transit Buses

What will services like Bridj, Blackline, and Leap Transit mean for traditional city buses?

If you ride a public bus with any regularity, you know all the common
complaints. It's not very clean and it's very, very crowded. It stops so often you can see pedestrians keeping pace on the sidewalk. It arrives 7 minutes late
and yet is considered "on time." But if you don't own a car, or simply
don't want to drive it, sometimes the bus is the only option.

That might be changing. A new wave of private buses are popping up in
several big cities across the U.S. They all seem to share a common
"luxury" quality — promoting WiFi and reserved seating — as well as a
common mission: to offer "choice" transit riders a better choice.

Take Bridj, a private
bus still in its testing phase in metro Boston. For $6, or four times an
MBTA bus fare, Bridj carries riders non-stop from Brookline to downtown
Boston, Kendall and Harvard squares, and Back Bay. Bridj says it uses
data to identify key service corridors (though the beta routes aren't
exactly counter-intuitive). An MBTA spokesman recently told the New York Times that the authority didn't see Bridj as a competitor, but the beta riders clearly do.

Or Blackline, a new
service that runs from Chicago's upscale Lakeview area to the downtown
Loop. Blackline closely parallels the CTA's 135 bus, but while travel
times aren't too different, amenities offer Blackline an edge. Reports
put the cost for a Blackline "weekly morning membership" at $23;
if evening membership is the same, then the total cost is about double
CTA fares ($20 for five round trips). The service is currently limited
to two morning and evening buses along one route, but the company
website anticipates expansion.

There's also Leap Transit,
a private alternative to San Francisco's Muni bus that emerged for
testing last year and whose website now teases full service in "Summer
2014." Leap Transit looks like the other private options: leather seats,
WiFi, smartphone ticketing, all at a cost above public transit (in this
case, $6 compared to $2). During its test run, Leap Transit drew the ire
of at least one city official, who criticized it for using Muni stops
— the same criticism leveled at the much-maligned Google buses.

So we see a pretty clear pattern with luxury buses offering a
higher-price option to commuters. They all tout an advantage to
"overcrowded" buses, and they all appear to have one in the form of a
mobile office environment and a guaranteed seat. Based on their beta
locations, they appear targeting the same type of choice rider who wants public transit, but better; it's no accident that the Times quotes a "biotech worker" in its piece on Bridj.

It's far too early to say what these services will mean for the good
(and bad) old city bus, but they do spark plenty of questions. Will the
services disrupt traditional public routes, or will they serve as
high-end carpools for workers from similar neighborhoods? Will the
benefits they provide for the transportation network outweigh the harm
they might cause to social equity? Will cities use them to consider charging a price for private access to the public curb?

And the biggest of all: Will transit agencies fight the services, or use them as motivation to do better themselves?